Project 32
by SirMandokarla
Summary: Mako is an orphan from the slums of Nar Shadaa. Only... that's about all she knows about her origins. Now that she's traveling the galaxy, it's about time she got some answers. Where did she really come from? Who are her parents? When did she get her cybernetic implants? ...what the blazes is "Project 32"?
1. Chapter 1

"So, I've… been looking for my family."

Aqura stopped in the middle of a series of punches and looked over at Mako. "Uncle Sherkan's still trying to keep us from comming him?" She sighed. "I need to talk to him about that. Gault and me were in real trouble back on Tatooine. At least Vormur and her squad pulled us out of that one."

Mako made a face at the nickname and said, "no…"

She trailed off.

"No, what?" Aqura asked. "The name makes sense. She's green, with silvery hair and red eyes. That's a flower. Tell me it isn't."

"Vormur aren't even-" Mako cut herself off. This wasn't the point. "No, I mean, I'm not looking for Sherkan. I'm looking for… my other family."

Aqura finally stepped away from the training dummy, wiping sweat from her forehead. "That's great," she said. "Find anything?"

Mako glanced up to meet her gaze, just for a moment. "You're not angry?"

"Angry?" The taller woman frowned, and Mako couldn't bring herself to meet her gaze. "Why would I be angry?"

Mako did her very best to shrink into the bulkhead without actually looking like that was exactly what she was trying to do. "I thought, well…"

"You thought I wouldn't want you to meet your family, Mako? Manda, why would you think that?"

"Because I've already got one. You said…" A lot. Aqura had said a lot. And she'd meant it, like she always did. That was the problem.

Aqura chuckled and leaned over to hug Mako. It was sweaty and hot and gross, and Mako squirmed to get away, but Aqura was a lot stronger than the little slicer.

"I said we're your family. I didn't say you couldn't have more. Osik, how do you think Mandalorian clans keep on? When a boy Mandalorian and a girl Mandalorian - or, well, a boy Mandalorian and a boy Mandalorian, since there's always adoption- you get the idea."

Having suitably embarrassed the poor girl, Aqura let her escape only moderately scathed and slightly damp. Mako let out a disgusted sound and tried to cover her red face with newly sweat-soaked sleeves.

"I'm not having a baby, Aqura!"

"Heh. Good thing, too. At the rate we're going, you'd be fighting Tarro Blood with a bump."

"Aqura!"

Aqura raised her hands and relented. "Look, I just don't see what the big deal is. You're looking for your family. Do you need help? What've you found? Should I get uncle Gault to help?"

"I'm not having a baby!"

"No, he's your uncle. If you were having a baby, he'd be… Hey, Gault! What's it called in Basic when your niece has a kid?"

"It's called, 'not my problem'," Gault called from across the ship.

"Aw, don't be like that! You'd make a great uncle, teaching the kid how to get away with mischief, showering them with lavish gifts that turn out to be moderately dangerous booby traps…"

Gault stuck his head out from around a corner and gave Aqura a surprisingly eloquent, "I am not dealing with this waste of time," look. Then he withdrew his head, leaving Aqura to shrug and ask Mako, "so, what've you found?"

The indulgent look on Mako's face dropped and she wandered over to the Torrent's ramp and sat down. "That's just it," she explained, running a hand through her hair. "I haven't found anything. There's no data on any adults matching my genetic profile around Nar Shadaa in that time. So I changed tac."

Aqura came over to sit by Mako and, though the slicer wrinkled her nose a bit, she accepted the hand on her knee.

"I started looking into my implant," she explained. "This was… a while back. It just occurred to me that I've had them forever, so I must have been teched out as a baby or something. Between that and whatever model I've got, there must be a lead, right?"

Aqura nodded along, stopping only when she saw the look on Mako's face.

"There.. was. Kind of. Turns out the tech I've got is as classified as it gets. Exclusively government contractor."

Aqura leaned into Mako, shoulder to shoulder. It was comforting, even if it was a little gross from sweat. Aqura could be like that, never quite seeing where her displays of affection should stop. Sometimes it helped, though, to always be sure somebody cared.

"Do you want me to grab Gault? I bet he can help with something this shady. I could even call in that favour from Captain Medle so he can look into the government stuff."

The girl shook her head and tapped her implant. "No, I already got it. And… it's not that government."

"Republic?" The look of surprise Aqura gave her matched the one Mako'd had when she first found out. The Republic had a certain reputation. Teching up babies, that was Sith stuff, or maybe Hutts. Not the squeaky-cleans of the galaxy.

Of course, that was always what that sort of people would want everyone to think.

"Yeah…"

"Mako," Aqura said, "This is a lot. How long have you been working on this? Why didn't you tell me about it?"

It turned out that Mako's boots were suddenly very interesting, and there definitely wasn't any reason to look up from them to catch Aqura's eyes, especially not to admit, "it's been almost two months now. It started out little. Just a thing I wondered about once in a while, you know? Then I got on the tech angle, and suddenly I was looking at SIS classified files, and now… well, from what I've found on, well, me, I probably wasn't even born on Nar Shadaa."

Aqura nodded. She probably understood more than she was saying. She talked up a storm, but Aqura always figured out so much that there was no way she could admit to it all. It was intimidating, even if Mako was definitely a genius by normal-people standards.

She wasn't a genius at this. Whatever that nod meant, it was a mystery to Mako. But… her instincts said she wasn't in trouble yet, so that was good.

"I'm out of my usual options. I've reached out to some of my old contacts on Nar Shadaa, and I'm just waiting now, hoping somebody will know something about my parents."

"So why come to her now?"

Both Mako and Aqura jumped, and the Mandalorian swore at Gault, who was moving to stand over the both of them. "Osik, Gault, either join in or butt out. You want to help or what?"

Gault looked about to say something unhelpful, but Aqura made a face that stopped him cold. For her, this was as serious as it got. This was family they were talking about.

The devaronian grimaced. "Well, I suppose I have a few people who have wires tapped in the right places. It's too early for me to stick my head out, but I can tell you what to say to get some information quick, if you're looking."

Mako perked up. A chance at Tyresius Lokai's information network? This was huge!

"You'd do that? Really?" The girl stood up fast, her arms caught halfway between cheering and hugging the old man, and she had no idea what she actually wanted to do with them. Gault stepped back to give her some room, so Mako opted just to throw her arms in the air and grin.

"Sure," he said. "Come upstairs, we'll call a couple of them right now, and I'll write up a list for the rest. Just keep me out of the holo when you get them on comm."

Aqura stood up and started following the two upstairs towards the comm room. "Is there anything I can do?"

"Sure," Gault said, "put on your armour and look Mandalorian while Mako talks. I'd let you do the talking, but I get the feeling she'll do a better job with an information network."

Mako's grin widened. This was a huge step into the big leagues. With an information network and a reputation for having helped win the Great Hunt, Mako would be able to do anything.

Gault was right, too. Mako would be better with contacts than her partner. Aqura had a habit of making quick friends and quicker enemies when she wanted information, and she didn't go hunting for information often enough, anyway. She wouldn't have any idea what to do with an actual network.

Aqura darted off to grab her armour while Mako started asking Gault about their plan. "What sort of things should I offer? How many resources do these guys have? Should I start out short-term or work out something for the long haul?"

Then something else occurred to her. "Am I too young? Are they going to take me seriously? What if I make a mistake? Do these guys all know each other, will they start talking about me? Should I try intimidating them? Can I intimidate them?!"

Hands came down on her shoulders and shook her once, and Mako was suddenly focusing on Gault's long red nose.

Well, it was the real world, so there was that.

"Stars, girl, take a breath. You're not calling right now, we're going to do a couple test runs first." He pointed a thumb at the cockpit. "I'm going to go stand in there, you're going to route a call from the cockpit to the main holoterminal, and you're going to pretend you've just uncovered the notorious Gault Rennow's real identity. Then you're going to try to pump me for information on your family. Got it?"

"Uh… why are we doing that? I mean, why that scenario?"

Gault grinned and patted Mako's shoulder. "Because, Mako, you're the smartest slicer I've ever met. When we get to the part with the real scumbags, you get ten minutes to find every dirty little secret you can. That's your intimidation. And," he thumbed at Aqura, walking back from her room in the full suit of armour, "a fully-armed Mandalorian at your shoulder."

"Something about rehearsals?" Aqura asked, looking between them and fiddling with her left bracer. The one that had most of the gadgets in it. It better not be broken again.

"Don't worry," Gault said. He stepped back and started walking towards the cockpit. "Even you can't screw up standing and looking tough. Just try not to say anything."

Aqura snorted and Mako made sure not to say anything she was thinking about how right Gault was.

She was still fiddling with that bracer.

"Aqura, wait, give it here." Mako grabbed her friend's arm and smacked away the other hand, which probably wasn't a good idea, because it was armoured. After a few seconds with her knuckles in her mouth, Mako shook out her hand and started fixing the bracer properly.

Gault called from across the ship, "still waiting on that call, Mako."

"In a minute!" Mako shook her head and started pulling on a magnetic clamp holding one of two tiny missiles. Technically, it wasn't supposed to be snug with its partner, but there was this awkward thing where, if it was too tight, a missile wouldn't fire, and if it was too loose, the bracer wouldn't close up properly.

"I can't believe you were trying to fix this one-handed," Mako muttered.

"It usually works," Aqura grumbled.

That was another thing. It was was really weird to hear somebody grumble through a voice synthesizer. Like watching a droid tap-dance. Machinery and life didn't mix that way.

"No, it doesn't. Remember the Colicoid tunnels? You fixed a jam by knocking your arm against a wall!"

"I was in a hurry," Aqura protested.

"You could have blown your arm off! There, done." She closed the bracer smoothly. "Just stop trying to do that alone until we can commission a better build on it, okay? I can name three one-armed bounty hunters off the top of my head, and their rates suck."

Aqura snorted. "You looked that up just now."

"Yes, I did." Implants counted as the top of her head. With barely a blink, Mako activated the Cosmic Torrent's (still a great name) holoterminal and called (well, not called, but it sounded better than, 'created a bizarre glitch to activate two systems in tandem rather than in parallel') the front of the ship.

Gault showed up, looking blue and cocky.

"You've reached Gault Rennow, bounty hunter extraordinaire. What's a Mandalorian want with me?"

Mako tried not to growl. "Nothing," she said. "I'm the one in charge here. That goes for the Mandalorian, and it goes for you, Tyresius Lokai."

Gault raised an eyebrow. "Uh, who? I've got two partners, and neither of them have a name that long."

Mako held back a smirk. "Tyresius Lokai," she repeated, "wanted from Hutt Space to the Core Worlds for a pretty impressive string of cons, thefts, extortions, and blackmailings. Faked his own death a while back and has been running around the galaxy as a participant in the Great Hunt ever since. I figure you were pretty good at hiding, now you're pretty good at finding people who don't want to be found. I want a piece of the second so you can keep enjoying the first."

Wow. This was really easy. She sounded exactly like the holovids!

"No."

Wait, what?

"Wai-" Mako shut her mouth with a clack, then tried again. "You understand the position you're in, don't you?"

Gault shrugged. "I get that you think I'm some famous con-man - which, by the way, would imply I was truly terrible at my job - but I've got no reason to help you. Tyresius Lokai didn't disappear, his body was delivered to Desad the Hutt himself, with DNA confirmation. Besides, like you said, I'm running around the galaxy. With some of the best and brightest in the galaxy as partners. What are you going to do about that? Gault Rennow out."

Mako stared dumbly as Gault flicked a switch and the holocall ended. She continued staring as Gault walked out of the cockpit with a grin on his face and a bounce in his step.

"Well," he said, "I'd say that went pretty well."

Mako shook her head to clear out the static. "Went well? What do you mean, went well? You hung up on me!"

"You realize," Aqura added, "I would have to hunt you down and kill you after doing that to Mako, right? If that were real, I mean."

Mako blinked. "Why?"

Aqura shrugged, which was a bigger deal than it looked. With all the armour she was wearing, she had to do a lot of lifting to make a perceptible shrug. "One person hangs up on you like that, you lose reputation. Besides, you're my sister. Nobody gets to insult you. And I'm not good at conflict resolution."

Mako stared at Aqura with astonishment that slowly turned to skepticism. Then Aqura giggled and Gault started chuckling, too. Soon they were all laughing together, until Mako wasn't even sure what they were all laughing at anymore.

When they'd all finally calmed down (of course, Aqura took longest), Mako asked again, "what do you mean, it went well?"

"Good question," Gault said. "And I've got one for you: why didn't you say anything when I asked what you were going to do?"

"Because it didn't make any sense!"

Gault winced and stuck a finger in his ear, waggling it around for a second before leaning towards her, ear-first.

"Sorry," Mako mumbled. "It's just, why would you do that? I threatened to drop the whole galaxy on you."

"Mm-hm," Gault said, "you sure did. You were a complete unknown dropping into my life and threatening to destroy it, Taris-style. So I would have ended the call and disappeared all over again."

"Hettir vheh." Aqura murmured (translation said, "burned earth/soil"), dragging her knuckles along her helmet's jaw in that annoyingly distracting way. "Makes sense. You fought fire with fire."

She paused and stopped with the loud metal-on-metal scratching. Probably because Gault was glaring at her.

"Oh," the Mandalorian said. "Sorry."

For somebody as clever as Aqura was, she could be really dense.

Still, Mako wasn't like her. She didn't mind being told the right answer once in a while.

"I escalated too quickly, is what you're saying."

Gault nodded, but shot Aqura another dirty look. At least Aqura had the sense to shrink away, stepping out of the conversation to let Gault teach his lesson in peace.

The devaronian leaned against the console and crossed his arms. "You want something more manageable, something that can do damage, but won't destroy the guy. Threats are stock and trade in our line of business, and you have to be able to carry through on them, but you can't play your whole hand at once. Makes people panic."

Before Mako could even finish nodding, Gault patted the holocomm and said, "so, want to try the real thing?"

Mako straightened so fast she thought she heard her spine crack, but it was Aqura who yelped, "what!?"

Gault shrugged and grinned the grin that made Mako want to punch him in the face. "You're a natural, kid. All you need to do is look into the guy for a minute or two and things should work out. Besides, and trust me on this, you'll learn a lot faster jumping right in. Sure, somebody'll probably send people to kill you if you screw up too bad, but I'll let you know if you're getting past the one-hired-gun mark."

Aqura grunted. "I can handle one hired gun. Sounds like a good deal to me."

This was… this was insane. They wanted to set things up now?

Gault was already tapping out something on the console, and Aqura had her hand on Mako's shoulder.

"Oya, vod. Oya."

Translation: "let's hunt, sister. Let's hunt."

And Gault was grinning like the evil shebs he was. He turned away from the console for a second and said, "his name's Detaron. He's a bit of a pushover, but he knows some of the Republic's best secrets. Have fun."

With that, he pressed the call button and sidled out of the way, leaving Mako to frantically start looking for information on a man named Detaron affiliated with Republic SIS.

There was nothing on the holonet about a man named Detaron. There wasn't even time to get into the SIS archives before the holo flickered with an image, a balding human man with at least three chins and a belt that had seen better days. Pretty sure he had a blaster on his hip, but there wasn't exactly a straight line from his shoulder to his hip.

"Carteri here," the man said. Then he did a double-take. "Coral? I don't believe it." Then horror dawned on his face. "You're monitoring SIS transmissions. That's the only way you could know I was sent after you. I- I have to call command."

"Woah, there, buster," Mako interrupted, scrambling to figure out where she'd missed the conversation. "Coral? My name's Mako." Then something else clicked, and she mouthed to Gault, "Carteri?"

Gault smiled that smile he got when he played pazaak. "Detaron," he mouthed back.

Advantage, team Mako.

"And yours is Detaron," she finished.

Huh. Turned out you could go visibly pale over holocomm.

"You shouldn't know that. Coral, I'm warning you-"

"Mako," she snapped. "Get it right. I've never heard of a Coral, and I don't care much what name you're using. I'm just a kid looking for my family, and I was told you'd be a good person to ask."

The man stumbled and practically cowered. "No," he whispered, "no, no no. I know what you did to the others. I wasn't involved in the project! You'll never find me!"

Then the comm went dead, leaving the crew of the Cosmic Torrent standing in silence.

Gault was the first one to speak.

"Well, Detaron always was a bit of a lightweight, but that was something else."

"What it was was a dead end." Mako kicked the console petulantly. She sighed. "Well, I guess we can try somebody else. Maybe it won't be as weird."

"Wait."

Gault and Mako turned to Aqura, who was pulling off her helmet. When she had it off, she peered at Mako close enough to make the girl uncomfortable, then turned on her holocomm. She didn't call anyone, just projected a holo of Mako.

When had she taken that picture? It looked as old as Kaas city, by the outfit.

Aqura just stood there, though, looking between the picture and Mako and generally just making Mako uncomfortable.

Just before Mako lost her temper and told the woman to stop, Aqura put away the holo and shook her head.

"No," she said. "No way he confused you for somebody else. You're too young to be SIS, but that's spy tech in your head. Plus, you're too cute not to recognize."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"What are you saying?" Gault asked.

"I'm saying," Aqura said, "I think Detaron, or Carteri, has some information we need, and we're going to find him. Mako, where was he?"

The slicer did a quick double-check on the call's ID, then blurted out, "Nar Shadaa."

Aqura grinned her hunting grin. "Then we're going to Nar Shadaa."


	2. Chapter 2

"Gwyv! Gwyv would know! She's good at that sort of thing! Makes people disappear all the time! Please, call him off! Please!"

Mako covered her face with a hand and sighed. Aqura, less than happy about having her identity mistaken for the whatever-th time that day, didn't let the weequay scumbag go.

"Gwyv?" Mako asked her commlink. Gault was on the other side, back on the Cosmic Torrent. He hadn't been willing to risk coming back to Nar Shadaa so soon after disappearing. In his own words, the Great Hunt wasn't even over yet.

Gault also sighed and said, "ask for a description."

Aqura, also on the comm, yelled, "where do we find her? What does she look like?"

"R-rodian! I mean, warehouse in the lower levels! She's green, and old, left antenna is kinda wilty pleasedontkillme!"

Lower levels? Again? Lower than this?

Mako looked up. Then, when she couldn't see much beyond the multicoloured lights of all the buildings above, she opened up a map of the city on her implant. It didn't so much show her a picture as just kind of let her know where they were, like she'd lived there long enough to feel her way around.

They were so very deep already. Legend had it Nar Shadaa had a lowest level, and she was pretty sure they were going to reach it at this rate.

"Not much of a description," Gault muttered, "but it doesn't sound familiar. I don't know many rodian women, and none in the disappearing business. Sorry, kid."

Mako just nodded, even though Gault couldn't see it, and waved to Aqura. The armoured woman dropped her prey, and he scampered off at a speed Mako had to envy. Then again, not being able to run that fast was part of why she'd had to become such a good slicer growing up.

So that she could grow up at all.

Aqura shrugged and wandered over. As she did, she threw a hand into the air and said, "lower levels, huh? Shab, think we'll find the bottom?"

Mako managed one fifth of a smile.

"I didn't think this would be so exhausting," Aqura continued, following Mako's lead to where the map said they should find Gwyv. "How many snitches is that? Eight?"

"And that's after tracking down the right sector," Mako added, kicking at some litter that passed her way, wafted along on some foul-smelling ventilation from… a sector up and over, according to her information.

"Ugh. I hate this."

"You're a bounty hunter, and you hate hunting."

"Not hunting. Tracking."

Mako raised an eyebrow at Aqura. The right one, because the left one had to fight her implant to go up appreciably. In response, Aqura rolled her eyes. Probably. Hard to tell, with the helmet.

"Look," Aqura said to Mako - who wasn't looking, because only an idiot kept her eyes on one spot in these streets. An idiot, or somebody in enough armour to tank a cannon. "Remember the mountain we climbed on Alderaan?"

Mako nodded, watching a twi'lek kid in the shadows just across the street, then scanning for others.

If potential pickpockets were all they had to worry about while they were here, it would be a blessing.

"It's like that. All the climbing was worth it in the end because of the view at the top."

This time, Mako managed half a smile as the picture of Alderaan's valleys settled into her mind's eye, soft greens and stark greys and blues, rocks piled so high they didn't seem like rocks anymore, but more like a beautiful version of Nar Shadaa's skyscrapers. Somehow the sky felt more real on that mountain than it ever had in space, where it stretched on forever but never really meant anything. That mountain, Dura's Reach… she'd go see it again someday.

"I wouldn't say that," Mako answered.

"Right," Aqura teased, "so all the complaining on the way up was just an act."

"Maybe," Mako said, watching the ground intently, "I just think if I'd known about the view from the start, it would have been different."

The Mandalorian hummed and caught a confident-looking little gang in a visored death glare. They didn't come closer. "I guess," she said. "I'd rather skip to the good part."

"The fighting?" Easy guess.

"Yeah. Except there isn't gonna be any good part at the end of this hunt."

Couldn't argue that. Detaron, or Carteri, or whatever, didn't seem like the sort to put up any kind of fight.

"It wouldn't be taking so long if Mandokarla wasn't so bad at interrogations," Gault said, reminding them he was listening in.

"Usen'ye, chakaar," Aqura grumbled.

'Go away(rude), thief,' said Mako's translator. Her translator, which definitely didn't have a censor in its subroutines.

Mako stifled a snort.

"There."

Mako looked up, squinted, and blinked. Far ahead of them was a series of buildings, blocky and deep-set into the buildings surrounding them. It was easy to see where they ended and where the next layer of Nar Shadaa sat atop them.

It helped that her map was pointing out that they'd arrived.

Still, Aqura hadn't had the map.

"That's right. How'd you know?"

"Look at the people around it."

It took another few seconds, but faint outlines became indistinct shapes, then revealed themselves to be people, and Mako saw it. It was pretty obvious, actually. Leaning against the wall were guards. Across the street were some lookouts. Just now, heading into one of the buildings, was a customer. Every one of them trying not to look like what they were and making it all the more obvious for the effort, even if they were all dressed in vagabond rags. It made sense, and Mako glancing away was the only reason Aqura had noticed it first. That, and maybe some really good eyesight.

Still, how would Aqura know what those sorts of people looked like in Nar Shadaa drab?

It occurred to Mako that she'd never asked about Aqura's past. They'd had long conversations about what they thought of the galaxy and their plans for the Great Hunt and all, and Aqura had even asked Mako for her story. Mako had just sort of assumed that all the stories of hunts and fights meant Aqura had lived her entire life as a Mandalorian. Still, there were some things Aqura knew that didn't make sense for that lifestyle.

Mako filed that under questions for later.

One of the guards walked up to her, pretending not to have two buddies flanking him and five or six more waiting just inside the building. "Hey, you. Gotta pay a fee to go around our territory."

Mako put out a hand before Aqura could ruin everything. Then she held out the other hand to the man who towered over her in smelly rags. He looked from Aqura to Mako's hand to Mako's face, which worked out well.

"Look," Mako said, "we're new in town and looking for someone. We heard Gwyv might be able to help us."

The man glared at them suspiciously. "You're bounty hunters," he spat.

Mako glared right back. "Not quite. Look, you can get out of the way, or my Mandalorian friend here can make you. Either way, we're going to see Gwyv, and we've got more than enough credits to make her happy to see us, whatever happens to the dregs outside."

After a bit more glaring and a last look at Aqura, who was idly playing with the part of her gauntlet the vibroblade came out of, the guy gave in and stepped aside.

Aqura moved just behind Mako's shoulder, like she really was just a bodyguard or something. It made Mako feel pretty important, especially for some kid from a neighbourhood not much different from here.

The inside of the building was just what you'd expect: empty, grey, dimly lit. A few people of various species were scattered along the walls, either waiting or listening for trouble from outside. Mako walked up to the only one who seemed important and told her they were here to see Gwyv.

"She's busy," she grunted, and Mako almost grinned at how obvious the lie was.

"Don't worry," Mako said, slipping the woman a credit chip to smooth things over, "won't take a minute."

Then she walked past and into the next room like she had a Mandalorian at her back.

There was another short hall, then a door that opened into a room so brightly lit in comparison to the rest of the house that Mako had to blink her vision clear. She didn't even notice the gold-plated hand in front of her until her vision cleared.

Aqura had moved to protect her as soon as she'd started blinking.

A nasally buzzing sound brought Mako's attention to a short rodian with a wilted antenna, just like the snitch had described. Then, realizing she couldn't understand what Gwyv was saying, Mako turned on a translator and sent it to Aqura.

"-to Gwyv's shop! You want some refreshments before the procedure?" Gwyv beckoned them forwards toward a massive machine and, sitting on a table near it… baked goods?

A table full of wrapped baking. That, Mako had not been expecting.

No, wait.

"Gwyv." Mako held up her hands. "We're just here for information. We're looking for someone."

"Oh, no no no. No information. Information is bad for business. Tell one person who they're after, suddenly nobody wants to get their face changed. Very bad for business. I can't help you. Are you sure you don't want a cookie?"

Mako tried to kick Aqura, who wasn't even trying not to laugh, but the Mandalorian dodged. Just as well. Beskar was tough stuff.

"No," Mako insisted. She brought up an image of the man they were looking for, balding and fat and a little bit pale, with unfortunate eyebrows. The colour was mocked up, but she was pretty sure she'd gotten it right. "I'm looking for this man. He might call himself Carteri or Detaron or something else by now."

Gwyv blinked at the picture a couple of times and shook her head. "Oh dear. If I had a face like that, I'd want it changed, too. I still can't help you."

"We can pay for information," Mako said. She looked Aqura, who nodded in agreement. They'd burned through quite a few bribes on the way here, and it was both their money. And Gault's, a little, but he didn't count. "If you could just point us at someone who might know."

Gwyv shook her head. "Your creds are no good here, hunter. Now, please leave while I'm still in a good mood. I don't get many cute ones in here, and you've been a nice distraction. Take a sweet roll if you like, but leave."

Aqura was actually eyeing the rolls, glancing between them and Mako, like she was checking permission. Mako rolled her eyes, but didn't say anything to the woman. To Gwyv, though, she said, "I'm a slicer. My friend is a Mandalorian. Are you sure there's nothing we can offer you?"

Gwyv stared at Mako for a few seconds, then walked right up to her and stared into her face. Big black compound eyes filled Mako's vision, and she was grateful that the rodain woman smelled a lot better than anybody else on this level. Probably the baking.

"No," Gwyv repeated slowly. "I don't want anything. I keep to myself, I give people what they want, I have my hobbies. I'm happy. You want to come in here, shake things… things…"

Gwyv trailed off, having turned around to walk away from Mako, and stared. Mako followed her gaze.

"Aqura!"

Aqura had her helmet half off, a sweet roll in her mouth, and a guilty look on her face.

"Uh… fhee 'i' offa," she said before tearing off a chunk with her teeth and swallowing it whole. "Sorry."

Gwyv, however, didn't say anything. She just stared at Aqura, and Mako wondered if maybe nobody had ever taken her up on the baking before. Gwyv didn't look angry, just stunned.

"Maybe," the rodian said, "we can come to an arrangement."

With that, she ran the last few steps to Aqura and stared her in the face the same way she'd done with Mako.

"Your eyes," Gwyv said, "I will give you the information you want for them."

Aqura didn't have her helmet on, so she just sort of peeked over the alien's head at Mako to see what was going on. Mako, on the other hand, was suddenly rethinking how harmless this disappearance woman was. Aqura must have seen the look on Mako's face, because her hand shifted to a position Mako knew from experience could put a vibroblade through somebody's throat in the time it took to blink.

"Mako," Aqura asked, "what did she say?"

Gwyv stepped back, raising her hands protectively in front of herself. "Oh, no, no, dears, not that. I don't trade in… ick. Can you imagine? I'd never be able to eat again!"

"She says she wants to trade information for your eyes, but 'not that way,'" Mako summarized. She didn't understand yet, but it was best to head off anything Aqura might do to another organ harvester. After what happened to the last group, it was best not to let the hunter mistake anybody for another one.

Aqura raised an eyebrow, then slipped her helmet back on. "You'll have to explain that one, Gwyv."

The rodian was all too happy to. She walked around Aqura to a cylindrical device that took up half the wall, with an array of computer terminals beside it that hinted at some pretty impressive tech inside.

"If you ever want to disappear," Gwyv said, gesturing at the whole thing proudly, "this is what you want. No fuss, short recovery times. Only a few weeks to get back on your feet! And, best of all, a constantly updating variety of appearance traits."

Mako wasn't sure what the rodian was talking about, and her implants weren't getting any information on the thing, but she knew a sales pitch when she heard one. "The point, please. We're still looking for someone."

"Yes, yes! You see, the information of how a being's face is put together is very difficult, very complicated. I need real faces to work from, or my customers all end up looking the same. Very tragic, very boring. But your friend! So wonderful, so interesting. For her eyes, I would trade information. Ugly man isn't even my customer; just wanted to disappear the normal way."

"My eyes," Aqura said skeptically. "A scan, you mean?"

Gwyv nodded vigorously.

"Oh, no, you don't," Mako growled, holding up hands to both of them. "I thought the whole point of that helmet was not letting anyone see your face. You want to let somebody get a full scan of it? Are you nuts?"

Come to think of it, why did Aqura wear the helmet? Braden had insisted on it way back when, but the reasons behind it were pretty vague.

Hadn't that Republic soldier said something about Aqura being a war criminal?

Mako filed that back under information best not asked about. None of her business. Hopefully.

"Oh, I'm very discreet," Gwyv assured them.

"Right. Until you see a pretty face."

"Oh, no! Then you are customers! Very different. Completely different. I would never betray a customer."

"And she's already seen my face," Aqura added. Then, in a skeptical tone, "apparently I'm memorable."

"Very memorable," Gwyv assured her. "I have never seen eyes like yours. I simply must have them!"

Mako had to turn away for a second and cover her face. This whole thing, it was stupid. Aqura should be in hiding for whatever reason it was, this rodian was trying to feed them home baking and get perfect copies of Aqura's face for an underworld disappearance network. They weren't even totally sure the man they were after knew anything at all about Mako or her family!

"Why haven't you said no yet?" Gault asked.

Good question.

Wait.

"Mandokarla," Mako said hesitantly, "when you said that I was memorable, what did you mean?"

"You mean yesterday, with that guy? I just meant there was no way he confused you for anyone else."

"And you based a manhunt off of that," Mako concluded, folding her arms. She felt she could be forgiven for getting caught up in Aqura's momentum. The woman had a way of leaping before looking and just dragging anyone nearby along with her. Before committing Aqura's likeness to an underworld database, though, they needed something, anything, more concrete than that.

Mako looked over at Gwyv. "And what do you think?"

The poor rodian looked confused, even based on Mako's limited understanding of insect-like facial expressions. She looked between Aqura and Mako for a second, then tilted her head. "What do I think of what?"

Aqura nodded her head at Mako. "The other day, somebody mistook Mako for someone else. Called her Coral, then spooked and ran. I figure that's not a coincidence. Mako thinks my brain cell's lonely."

Both of the others stared at her.

"Mirsh solus?" Aqura tried, then sighed. "She thinks I'm being stupid, and shouldn't be going with my gut. What do you think? Would you ever mistake Mako for someone else?"

Surprisingly, Gwyv nodded and walked over to the cylinder on the wall. In seconds, she had a series of faces flickering past, muttering things like, "chin's too short. Ears stick out too much. Forehead is too flat. Face is too round."

Eventually, she had an image on the screen that Mako thought was pretty accurate, and Mako said so.

Gwyv and Aqura shared a look and both shook their heads emphatically.

"No, dear," Gwyv said.

"What do you mean, no?" Mako said. "It looks just like me. Here." She took the image, routed it through her implant, and showed it above her holocommunicator. "Loo-"

Then she looked again. Whatever was wrong, she couldn't put her finger on it, but it didn't look right this way.

"Shape of the head, dear," Gwyv said. "All wrong. And that's the closest I could come with anything I have. And look-" The rodian stabbed her finger at the eyes. "Terrible. Maybe I should take your eyes, too."

"They are nice eyes," Aqura agreed, and that sounded really creepy with that synthetic voice.

"Like new-baked bread by firelight," Gwyv agreed. "Hard to get right. Nothing looks right without them."

"Okay, okay!" Mako held up her hands, staving off more discussion of her features as much as just surrendering the point. "So you really don't think he could have been thinking of someone else?"

Gwyv shrugged. "Could be family resemblance, or maybe he has bad eyes, but I don't think so, dear."

"Now can I trade?" Aqura asked.

Mako waved her hand to give permission and turned away. She'd had enough of Aqura for a few minutes.

Maybe they were right. Maybe this was a real chance at finding her family, and Aqura hadn't led them off to who-knew-what in the middle of the Great Hunt.

This hadn't even mattered to Mako much before she'd met Aqura. Back when she'd had Braden, it was all she needed to have someone there. Before Braden, she hadn't even needed that. She'd survived the streets on her own, even made a name for herself to some degree. As much as a fifteen-year-old kid could.

Then she'd met Aqura, and Aqura was just so happy to have her as a sister, so ready to introduce her to the the rest of the family, people Mako hadn't even met in person yet, but were more welcoming than anybody Mako had ever met.

It should have been scary. Every instinct claimed that kind of behaviour was a setup. But… Aqura wasn't like anybody Mako had met on the streets. The Mandalorian had a way of taking things for granted that Mako would never have considered.

Like this. Aqura stepped into the cylinder on the wall and started taking her helmet off as it closed over her, sealing her into a metal tube that was going to steal away parts of her identity to give to other people.

"She's going through with it, isn't she?" Gault asked.

"Yeah."

"Can't you just delete it later?"

Mako snorted. "If that thing's attached to a network, I'm secretly a protocol droid."

There was a staticky sigh, and Gault said, "I'll see what I can do. We're probably stuck, though."

True. And Aqura probably had no idea.

Would she even care?

Seconds later, the device opened back up and let Aqura out. She and Gwyv whispered a few words to each other, Aqura shrugged and shook her head, then called over, "Mako, grab some of the pastries. Gwyv's got something to tell us, then we'll go."

Mako rolled her eyes and went to get a few of the baked goods, and was chewing on one of them before Gwyv started talking.

"The ugly man's probably in the Enpa sector. We keep track of competition around here, and J'kel had a few fitting that description go through recently. He's better at tech blackouts than I am, but he can't do faces at all. And finish your pastries before you get there, or they'll know I blabbed. No good for business, no good at all."

The hunting pair nodded and were practically pushed out the door, but with invitations to come back any time they liked. After all, Gwyv said, "I like the ones with good appetites."

They got some strange looks from the guards and lookouts on the way past, but it was over the pastries more than anything else. Or maybe it was over Aqura whining about not being allowed to eat any of them. After all, there wasn't any point flashing her face all around, right? The fact that it seemed like payback for the stress of the entire ordeal with Gwyv was a coincidence.

Which didn't stop Mako grinning every time she bit into something new and heard Aqura's synthesized grumble.

Heh. Served her right.

The Enpa sector was far enough that they needed a speeder taxi to get there, but once there, all they needed to do was start asking around.

By the second bribe and third snitch, they knew they had the right area. When the fourth poor sleazeball pointed shakily down the next road, Mako's heart leapt, even though her feet throbbed.

And next time they came through a place like this, they'd bring Gault. He'd know how to sweet-talk these guys properly. Back when she'd been in their position, all Mako had wanted was to survive. Now, she was wishing she'd learned better ways to get what she wanted than offering her services or scaring people.

At least Aqura was being gentle. Nobody'd gotten any rougher than they could walk off so far. If Detaron - or Carteri or Londen or whatever - was where they said, the day would end without anybody really hurt.

Mako stopped in front of the door to a run-down apartment complex that was exactly the sort of place people went if they wanted to get off the grid.

Or just get in out of the cold.

"Mandokarla," Mako said quietly, as much to avoid spooking their target as to let herself trail off if she needed to. Aqura turned to face her, and Mako finished, "don't break anything in here. Walls and stuff, I mean. The people around here need places like this."

Aqura didn't even question. She just said, "you got it, cyar'ika," and pulled open the door.

Whatever the painful version of nostalgia was, it hit Mako hard in that moment. The inside of the building was dimly lit with a single flickering light, the walls were only technically there in most cases, and one was just missing off to the right side where it made the entrance to another hallway big enough for a speeder to get through. There was insulation on the floors pillaged from the walls and people huddled in the corner in varying states of consciousness or life.

Those who could, looked up when the gold-armoured Mandalorian stepped through the doorway. For a half a second, there was silence, and Aqura started to raise her hands to placate them.

"Hunter!" somebody screamed in huttese. Then chaos broke loose.

"Osik," Aqura swore. "Oya!" And with that she dashed up the worn stairs, dragging Mako along by her hand. By some miracle, nothing broke and they didn't fall.

"Which room?!"

Mako pointed where her internal map said the right room was, and Aqura bent her knees and dropped her shoulder in a stance the slicer recognized. Then Aqura changed her mind and ran for the door instead of slamming it through as a human battering ram. Without even checking the door, she popped one of her vibroblades, jammed it into the door, and sliced smoothly through the locking mechanism.

The fat man on the other side of the door was trying to climb through a window that wasn't meant for a man his size, even if it had been designed with escape in mind. In a neighbourhood like this, that wasn't unlikely.

In that flowing way she had, Aqura reached out an arm and fired her grapple cable. It caught the man, hooked around him, and she pulled casually.

"Mako," she said, stepping aside.

Mako stepped past her to the man struggling on the ground.

It was him. Whatever his name was, this was the man who'd recognized her.

"Londen," she said.

He froze and turned to look at her. "C-Coral!"

Mako winced. "My name's not Coral. It's Mako."

After another attempt to wriggle free, the man gave up. "Yeah," he snapped, "you're not Coral. You're just some other kid with an SIS implant buried in your skull, who just happened to contact me the same day I was assigned your file."

"What do you mean, my file?"

Detaron glared at her, then nodded to a table nearby that desperately needed cleaning. One of the things on it was a datapad. Mako stepped over and, picking it up with as few fingers as possible, looked it over.

The file that read "Coral" opened to a picture and a lot of blacked-out, encrypted data.. The picture...

"She… really does look like me," Mako said softly.

"Hm?" Aqura peered over, reeling in Detaron as she did. When she saw the picture, she grunted. "Huh. I don't know, there's something different about her."

Whatever it was, it wasn't much. "Coral" had chosen straight hair where Mako's swept into dreadlocks at the back, and the other girl was paler, probably because she didn't run around outdoors with a Mandalorian all the time, but other than that, they were practically indistinguishable.

"Here." Aqura pulled the file from her hands and flashed it in front of Detaron's face. "What do you think, ast'ehutyc?"

Fatty, Mako's translator said. As in food, not a person. Usually.

When Detaron resisted, Aqura shoved the picture in his face. "Look at it."

"And, while you're at it," Mako added, "open it. I'd rather not deal with the encryption if I don't have to."

Without so much as an air of defiance, Detaron punched a long code into the datapad, then said, "just add the cypher. It's in my pocket."

Mako knelt down and kept an eye on Detaron until she'd fished a small data cartridge out of his pocket and plugged it into the datapad. As she'd only half-expected, all the data that had previously been blacked out or outright hidden appeared.

"You didn't answer my question," Aqura said.

"What's Project 32?" Mako interrupted her.

"I don't know."

Aqura tugged roughly on the line coiling around Detaron, but he just snapped, "I don't! It's something that Coral's involved in, and she's killing off everyone else who was involved."

That wasn't good. Whoever Coral was, Mako didn't want somebody with her face going on a killing spree.

"So you admit she's not Coral?"

Way beside the point, Aqura.

"That's why you ran," Mako said. "Project 32, does it have anything to do with my implants, or why I got them so young?"

"I don't know! Kid, I don't even know who you are or why I'm not dead yet. Everything I know is on that datapad. Everything else was need-to-know."

Mako did another quick scan over the datapad, then nodded to Aqura. "You can let him go."

She did, slipping the cable free and reeling it in before the big man could stand up, though the guy did it slowly and unsteadily. When he was finally standing up straight, he asked, "that's it?"

"That everything you've got on Coral?"

He nodded hesitantly.

"Then we're done," Mako concluded. "You should probably report to your bosses, but you might not want to tell them about us. I doubt they'll be too happy you folded like flimsiplast the moment a T-slit visor showed up at your door."

Detaron scowled, but didn't say anything, and Mako and Aqura left without any trouble.

"Do you think we should have given him our comm frequency?" Aqura asked. "If he's telling the truth about Coral, he might need our help. And it'd help us find her faster, if she finds him."

"And," Gault cut in, "it'll help him set a trap for you any time he likes. By the way, take your time coming back. I've got some finishing touches to get through before you're done out there."

The two women shared a look, then started running.


	3. Chapter 3

Mako was mixing a new chemical cocktail when it came to her. She gasped and handed the vial she was holding to Aqura with a distracted, "here," before running to the stairs and up to the ship's holoterminal. For what she was doing, she needed the power it provided.

The datapad she carried everywhere smacked down onto the terminal's surface, open to the only file she used it for. With a thought, she dove into the holoterminal's system, scanning over the datapad and searching the holonet at the same time.

It didn't take long to slip back into the SIS databases. For an intelligence service, they were disturbingly lax in some of their security.

The first thing she did was check files she'd already been through. Every back door she'd built for herself, every trick she'd memorized or stored away, they let her open up any file she wanted, look through, then abandon it for the next one.

File after file, through reams of data, and staring at the datapad the entire time.

Mako didn't need to read the datapad. She'd memorized it weeks ago. There was a picture of an eighteen-year-old girl - woman? - with straight, dark hair and an implant at her temple. Just like Mako.

Too much like Mako. Aqura insisted she didn't see it, but Gault agreed that Coral was more than just a sister. Probably a twin.

Probably not a twin. Not with twelve different birth certificates tangential to Project 32 files and all with nearly identical genetic sequences attached.

Those, she checked next.

She should have told Aqura and Gault about those. About her suspicions and all the huge amounts of nothing she'd found looking for information on Coral and Project 32. It was just… how could she? Aqura might insist she would be with Mako through everything, but she handled enough as it was. Mako tried as much as she could to pay her sister back, but…

Her sister. When had she started thinking of Aqura that way, even in her own head?

Mako shut her eyes tight for a second, still sifting through data. She drew in a breath to sigh.

"So is there a reason Mandokarla's standing downstairs holding a vial of orange who-knows-what? She asked me to ask you if it was safe to put down. You're not planning on blowing us up, are you?"

Mako's eyes flew open and she spun to face Gault. Then his words processed.

"Oh, osik," she muttered, then shouted, "Aqura! You can put the vial down! It's just a modified adrenal stim. Sort of. It won't explode or anything."

"Oh, thank goodness," Aqura half-shouted back. There was the faint sound of glass clattering hopefully gently, then the Mandalorian came up the stairs and leaned against the wall beside Gault.

She didn't look good. Well, she looked great, because she always did, with bizarrely perfect hair, eyes that shone blue, and pale skin that managed to look pure instead of pasty. But other than that, she was a wreck. Her hair only hung perfectly because she didn't need to put time into it. There were bags under her eyes and her skin was paler than usual, and her smile had a touch of grimace to it.

"You know, Gault," Aqura said dryly, "you could have just taken the vial off my hands. Hand." She gestured significantly with one arm, relatively uninjured with an elbow brace, to the other, which was in a cast.

Gault shrugged and screwed his face up in a mockery of innocence. "You seemed like you had it."

"Dar'hayc," Aqura growled with a smile, but Mako didn't pay attention to the translation.

She'd just caught something on the holonet. Turning away, Mako focused on the thing she'd found while running nearly on autopilot. And wasn't it worrying that the SIS database was that simple to navigate, once you got in?

It only took a quick double-check to confirm what she'd found. A backdoor, of sorts, but one like threading a spinning needle. The design wasn't familiar, but the technique that had gone into it, the abilities it would take to get through it, were unmistakable.

"Coral." Mako's hand came up to brush her implant. A direct mental link to the holonet itself, and the only thing that could let a sentient interact with programs in real time.

The only type of device that could leave a trace like this, and it had taken her months to think of searching for signs of it. Minutes to find what she was looking for.

If there'd been another Mako in the room, Mako would have kicked her.

"What is it? Did you find her?"

Mako started again, this time at Aqura's voice from right beside her.

Mako opened up her mouth to lie, to tell Aqura not to worry and that she was just starting on a trail. She looked at the huntress's stance, which was careful with ribs that weren't quite whole yet.

Then Gault spoke.

"Yep, that's a clue, alright." Then he frowned at his datapad. "Almost too good a clue. Does your-"

He caught Mako's glare.

"-sister," he drew out the word, "know you're looking for her?"

He was doing this on purpose. Gault suspected exactly what Mako did, and he wasn't subtle about it.

Aqura didn't react. She was too distracted, probably by the pain from the injuries she wouldn't take painkillers for.

"I've been careful," Mako lied, skipping over the fact that Gault was looking at the database of a national spy agency. "I just need some time."

Gault and Aqura both nodded, but even though Gault put down the datapad and wandered off and Mako turned back to the terminal to keep working, Aqura didn't leave. She made her way over to a crate by the wall and sat down on it. It took her a while, gingerly getting down without hurting her ribs or using her arms, but she managed to sit down and lean back against the wall over the course of a minute.

Mako tried to get back to work. She really did. With the coding as similar to her own as it was, it was easy to pick apart and look for clues, it was just…

"Mandokarla."

Aqura winced, unsure of what she'd done wrong. "Yeah, Sparks?" she asked hesitantly.

"Go to sleep."

The huntress frowned, glanced away, then hesitantly met Mako's eyes. "I'm… not tired."

"Yes, you are," Mako said. "You're exhausted."

"I want to be here when you call her."

Mako shut her eyes and let out a long, slow breath. "Mandokarla," she repeated, "it's going to take hours,maybe even a day or two, before I find something. After that, maybe I'll be able to call her."

Mako stopped and almost choked, eyes widening at what she'd just said.

Call Coral? She hadn't even been considering it, and now she'd all but promised Aqura she'd do it. She opened her mouth to take it back, but wasn't sure how, wasn't sure how to tell Miss "Family Before Everything" Aqura that she didn't know how to feel about contacting… whatever Coral was to her.

Aqura just nodded. "Alright," she said. "I'll go to sleep. Don't work yourself too hard. You'll wake me up before you go see her, won't you?"

Mako nodded absently, getting back to work, then, blinked as Aqura moved off and the words sunk in.

Go see Coral?

It was like Aqura had forgotten the look on that SIS agent's face when he saw them and thought Mako was Coral. This woman could be dangerous, and they didn't know anything about her except that she looked just like Mako herself, down to the implant in her temple.

The door to Aqura's room closed and Mako put her partner out of her mind at the same time.

Work. That was what Mako needed. She'd find Coral, then she'd decide the rest.

First, she put portions of the code she'd found into the algorithm she'd used to find the first one. Then, by all appearances, she waited. For hours, she scanned through SIS databases, then Imperial Intelligence databases, then Hutt Cartel financials. All the most dangerous places she could find, places that would need back doors as refined as the one she'd found. On each one, she placed a tracker, a program to ping her if it was accessed.

It was a long process and involved a lot of adapting on the fly. Coral's back doors were signature, sure, but they were never exactly the same. That would make it too easy for anybody to do exactly what Mako was doing. A virus was purged using the exact same protocol, after all.

About the time when Mako's eyes were starting to drift closed, she heard the sound of a throat clearing and felt something pushed into her hands.

She looked down to see a cup of caf, then looked up to see Gault holding another.

Mako smiled. "Thanks, Uncle Gault."

Gault shrugged and looked like he was trying to decide whether to smile or scowl. "The droid made the caf. I just brought it up."

It was great caf. Mako and Gault had put their heads together, researching and budgeting and reaching out to old contacts to get the perfect stuff. This particular blend was from a little-known but well-regarded farm on Dantooine.

It was a good example of what being with Gault and Aqura was like.

Staring at her cup, Mako murmured, "Aqura wants me to call Coral when I find her."

Gault nodded, tilted his broken horn to Aqura's room, then led the way to the cockpit, as far from where their injured friend was resting as possible. Over the catwalk by the engines, through a room that probably shouldn't be storing as much stuff as it was, considering it was their only entrance to the ship's turrets, and then into the cockpit.

There were seven seats in the cockpit, which felt excessive, but at least each of them was there for a reason. Pilot and copilot at the front, navigator in the center, and then the back left pair were for weapons and power while the right were for communications and cyberwarfare.

Mako sat down in her favourite spot and spun to face the middle, the navigator's spot Gault liked, not because he knew where they were going, just because he liked being in the middle.

Considering Aqura's favourite seat was weapons, it was a wonder they ever got anywhere.

Mako closed her eyes and made an effort to focus.

Gault waited until she sat down, then closed the door and sat down.

"You don't want to call Coral, then."

Mako nodded.

"You don't trust her, but you don't think Aqura will listen if you say so."

Nod again.

They sat in silence for several seconds, Mako trying to focus on the problem instead of letting her mind run away and work on any other problem she could think of. Formulae for the adrenal she'd been working on blurred through her mind.

"I think she's right."

That got Mako's attention.

"Now hold on," Gault said, holding up his hands. "No need for that look, I just mean, what else are you going to do? Once you've tracked her down, that seems like the last step to me. You've learned as much as you can without meeting her. So see her, get a measure of her, see what you think."

She gave the devaronian a sharp look. "Is that what you would do?"

He snorted. "Oh, stars, no. A mysterious twin with your smarts and a reputation for killing people connected to a shadowy government conspiracy? I'd change my name again and find a place to lie low until I was sure she'd lost interest."

Mako rolled her eyes. "Just like you're doing now, basically," she said.

"Exactly."

It was something worth considering, even if Mako had to laugh at Gault over it. Only, there was no proof Coral had any interest or grudge against Mako herself. Besides, if Coral was anything like Mako, it was better to go in and find out whatever she could before the whole crew woke up with daggers in their eyes.

"There is a difference, though," Gault interrupted Mako's thoughts.

"Oh, yeah?"

Gault nodded sagely. "You've got a Mandalorian backing you up." Then he cocked his head. "You're a Mandalorian now, actually."

"Not until we get back to Mandalore," Mako corrected him with a smile. Then her smile dropped.

Gault knew exactly what caused the sudden shift. "Just wait until she's all healed up. That can't really be worrying you that much."

"Do you really think she'd wait if I found Coral?" Mako stood up and walked to the front of the cockpit. She looked out at the all the uncountable points of light out there, leaned her head against the cool transparisteel, and started counting in the back of her mind.

"Aqura got those injuries fighting for her clan," Mako said to the stars. "She wouldn't wait a second before doing the same for me. She's got no sense when it comes to family. It's… do you know what a fatal flaw is?"

"You think caring for her family is going to get her killed?" Gault's voice trailed off thoughtfully. "You know, you may have a point... But as long as I'm on that list, I'm not too worried."

Mako turned around with a grin. "You old con-man. You don't really think that."

"Sure, I do. With me around, she's got somebody with enough common sense to keep her out of trouble. You know what your flaw is, kid?"

Worrying too much? Biting off more than she could chew? Bad luck? Asking too much of others?

"You don't like asking for help,"Gault said, catching her eye. "Aqura's there for you through everything. No strings. We're both getting used to that."

Mako froze. He was right, of course. Mako felt like she was spending all her time trying to repay Aqura these days. Even becoming a Mandalorian with her had been more about giving something back than anything else.

"I'm saying you can handle this, kid," Gault continued. "You've got us to back you up, and you're nothing to sneeze at, yourself."

Mako smirked, though her mind was still on what Gault had said. "You've been letting Aqura rub off on you."

Gault shrugged. "Maybe that's not such a bad thing. The kid's nuts, but she's loyal." Then he got a distant look. "Maybe I could have used that example years ago."

Before Mako could ask what that was supposed to mean, the man stood up and started towards the door. Over his shoulder, he said, "if you want to pay her back a little, get this done quick, Sparks. Just don't leave it unfinished."

He left and the door closed behind him, leaving Mako alone with the consoles and the stars.

She walked over to the communications terminal, sat down, and got back to work.

* * *

It was a sleepless day before she found anything, and that was after searching through Black Sun and Chiss Ascendancy databases, both. What she found, though, was impossible to mistake.

An address, of sorts. It took Mako another hour to backtrack it through proxies, but then she was staring at a line of numbers comprising an address.

Coral. She'd found Coral.

After all this time, it had been as simple as using the only thing that really connected them - their implant.

Maybe not the only thing, Mako admitted to herself. Coral was a slicer, an excellent one, just like her. It wasn't enough to make Mako hope like Aqura hoped, but it was something.

Maybe Project 32 was something that needed to be shut down. If Coral needed help, it wouldn't be Mako's first time making friends by offering to kill somebody.

Even with that thought, Mako put off calling Coral or even telling anyone she'd found her. The first thing she did was go to sleep. Then, she finished up her work on the adrenal she'd been making. After that, she put the adrenal in a dart for Aqura's armour. After that-

"You look a little busy."

Aqura stood by the stairs, arm still in a sling and steadfastly ignoring the droid, 2V, dusting the holding cell right beside her.

"Is everything alright?" Aqura asked.

"Fine." Mako tried to make it sound offhand. "Just finishing up the new… thingy. If it works like the recipe says, it should cause a hyperfocus effect. You'll have to make sure whoever you're pointing it at is looking at you when you hit them with it, but after that you'll have their undivided attention."

Aqura walked over a little more gracefully than she'd done the other day, took a look at the dart, then down at the pink liquid still left over. "So, kind of like an honour duel without the honour."

It was such a perfectly "Aqura" thing to say that Mako had to laugh. "Yeah, something like that. It's yours, obviously. Me and Gault don't like getting shot at as much as you do."

She handed it over to Aqura, who took it in two fingers and looked at it closely, whistling softly. "Kandosii," she declared. "I'll bring it on the next hunt."

Then the Mandalorian refocused. "You're waiting to call Coral?"

Mako didn't say anything. Gault and Aqura were right. She should call. The risk couldn't be more than sneaking around SIS servers. After a second, she pasted a smile on her face and said, "yeah, let's give her a call. What's the worst that could happen?"

The joviality she ended with was so forced it was a miracle Aqura didn't pick up on it.

Aqura just grinned back and said, "that's the spirit. Want me to get in my armour?"

"Yes." Please, she didn't say.

Aqura nodded and darted off to her room. Mako pointed at the droid and ordered it to follow, and they both left her to her thoughts.

There wasn't much left to think about. Coral was her sister, involved in who knew what, and that was as simple as it got. It had taken months to find out as much as she had.

She just wished Aqura weren't injured right now. It'd barely slow the woman down, and she wouldn't even consider making Mako wait on her account, just like Mako wouldn't keep Aqura from what she was doing for her clan.

"I'm not ready," Mako whispered to herself.

A hand caught her shoulder. Gault, this time. He didn't even say anything, just guided her upstairs with that confident smile of his. Together, they waited for Toovee to help Aqura into her armour.

She came out with the same stride she always did, moving more easily than she did outside her armour. Without a word, she touched Mako's shoulder and took up a spot opposite Gault, both of them standing just close enough to brush her shoulders with theirs if they swayed.

Mako leaned into Aqura's armour, just for a second, then stepped forward and entered Coral's holocom frequency.

Nothing to worry about. Just a stupid call.

Mako's look-alike appeared before the terminal could ring once. She looked around, searching in a way nobody using a holocom did.

"Hello?"

Aqura let out a quiet breath, probably finally admitting to herself how similar Mako and Coral looked.

If only Mako could let the others do the talking. There was no chance of that, though. Coral was Mako's family, in whatever way that meant to people who'd never met before.

With a combination of wariness and hope, she spoke up.

"Hi…" she trailed off, then tried again. "Coral? It's Coral, right? I'm Mako."

Coral snapped to look at her, eyes wide. "Mother of- Mako? My little sister, Mako?" The slicer's heart clenched tight. It was so different than when Aqura called her that.

"I can't believe it!" Coral didn't sound happy so much as completely stunned. "I thought… I thought you were dead. How did you find me?"

Hoo boy. How did she explain that?

Without a lot of detail, she decided.

"Wasn't exactly easy," Mako admitted, then added, "ran into an SIS guy looking for you."

"Izak? The SIS agent, was his name Izak?"

Mako grimaced. "No idea. He was big guy," she said, holding her arms out wide, "went by Carteri when we found him, but-"

"Oh no! Mako, you've got to help me, please!"

Mako blurted out the first thing she could think of before Aqura interrupted and volunteered them for something stupid.

"If you're going to tell me SIS is after you," she said as casually as she could, "I already figured that out."

"Carteri's just one of the agents after me," Coral added, hurried and scared. "Izak's the one leading them. If he finds me…"

There. Mako seized on the pause. "What?" she asked. "What does he want you for?"

Did she pry into Project 32? Ask whether Coral was killing SIS people? How much could she ask without spooking Coral even more? Mako shot a look at Gault, but Coral blasted on without even listening.

"I've got to go. I've been on this channel too long already. He's on Dromund Kaas looking for me right now. If there's anything you can do to stop him-"

"Wait, Coral! Just tell me what's going on!"

"They're already tracing me. Help me, Mako! You're my only hope."

The line went dead and, with one last ping of data, left the room suddenly dim without the holoterminal's blue light.

Aqura shot off towards the cockpit before either Gault or Mako could say anything and Mako just watched her go.

"It's a trap," Gault said.

"I don't know." Mako shook her head. "She didn't answer any questions, but she did seem pretty scared. Besides, why would she want to hurt us? We just met."

"Right." Gault agreed, walking to the stairs and down to the lower floor. "Which makes you a lookalike she can send at this Izak fellow without feeling guilty when you fake her death for her, the hard way."

"She sounded just like me when I'm scared," Mako said softly, following Gault until he reached their weapons locker and started filing through it.

Gault looked up from his search and his sharp features softened somewhat. "She did." He sighed. "Maybe I'm just being paranoid. It's not often a total stranger can tug on these ol' heartstrings, and it's worrying me."

He pulled out a rifle and a pistol, handed them both to Mako, and went back to looking for more.

"How are we going to find this girl, anyway? Dromund Kaas is a big planet. Even assuming she's holed up in Kaas City, that's a lot of ground to cover. And what are SIS agents doing on the Imperial capital?"

"All good questions," Mako whispered, holstering the pistol and strapping the rifle to her back.

"What was that?" Gault asked over the clanging of equipment.

"She's my sister. I started this looking for my parents, but I can't just abandon her, even if-" Mako paused as the ship changed course. "Even if it doesn't mean the same thing to me as it does to Aqura.

"And we have her location," she added, tapping her implant. "It was the last thing through the comms."

Gault grunted and pulled out a grenade for each of them, a rifle for himself, and a slicer's spike. "Definitely a trap, then. Too risky to send her location on a monitored line, otherwise." He handed her the spike and said, "get that loaded up with the nastiest stuff you can think of. Whatever you'd use to blast the SIS or Hutts if you needed to cause enough trouble to get out fast."

Mako took the spike with a raised eyebrow.

"Do you want to be an old slicer?" Gault asked.

Mako raised a hand defensively. "I get it. Hand me another one; I'll get one for nasties, one in case we just need to spook people."

The devaronian gave a grin, golden eyes glinting with pride. "It's nice to be the pessimist of the f- crew. Damn, helmet-head's got me doing it, too."

He handed over a second spike, scowling now. Mako gave him a light shove on the shoulder and nodded towards the front of the ship. "Tell Aqura to come back here and get her gauntlets. I'll load that new dart for her, then get to work on these," she held up the spikes and walked past Gault to her makeshift chemistry set/workshop.

"And get Toovee to check on the egg," she called as Gault hurried up the staris. "That egg's going to hatch soon and I don't want it to be while we're out."


	4. Chapter 4

"Dromund Kaas," Aqura muttered. "I did not miss this place." She brightened. "Maybe Crysta's still at the enclave!"

"Focus," said Gault. "We've got a trap to spring and we need you ready for it."

He glanced meaningfully at Aqura's shoulder, hidden under her armour. "As ready as you can be."

Aqura shot something back, probably something optimistic and annoyed. Mako wasn't listening. She was busy studying the blueprints she'd downloaded for the building they were headed for. Hopefully. Even best-case scenario, they were heading off SIS agents before they caught Coral. Worst case scenario?

Worst case scenario, Mako tried not to let her mind run away with ideas of the Emperor himself lying in wait with an army of Sith who'd woken up on the wrong side of the bed that morning. In any case, the most likely worst case scenario was a building wired to explode, linked to a locator frequency bounced off Mako's implant, and…

And Gault thought he was the pessimist among them. Still, Mako did a quick check on her implant, then on Aqura's armour, just to be sure.

Kaas City stretched out below their rented speeder, with the old Mandalorian Enclave barely visible to the north and that horrible Sith temple far beyond the city's limits, out to the west. The place they were headed was near the market, a crowded place that no self-respecting SIS goon would get into trouble near.

It was possible it wasn't SIS after Coral at all, or that they had spies deep enough in the Empire to commit to a manhunt in the Imperial capital, but Mako doubted it.

Not worth checking, either, since the first time Mako got close to that sort of information, she'd tripped so many red flags the holoterminal changed colour. Mako trusted Aqura to keep an eye out and make sure she didn't get disappeared, but there were limits to reasonable risk.

There was the building. Three stories tall, black and grey metal and stone, just like most of the buildings in this area.

"Gault," Mako called from the back seat, pointing down, "there's our destination."

"Oh, good. Just where I wanted to be today."

In spite of his grumbling, the pilot veered the vehicle down until they almost touched the roof of their destination.

"Just dropping the kids off," he said, shooing them out. They got out onto the roof and he passed Mako her backpack. "I'll keep an eye out for trouble. Call if you need a quick getaway."

He looked around at the skies. They were stormy, grey, with lightning flashes providing most of the light from above. The rest of the light came from the city below.

"Say," Gault asked, trying to sound casual, "how many laws am I breaking here, Sparks?"

Mako did a quick check and shrugged. "Only seven. Huh. I wonder if I miss-"

Gault took off, joining a nearby speeder lane. If things went as planned, he'd hide in plain sight like that until they called him up and asked for their pick-up.

"This way." Mako led Aqura to the roof entrance, down onto a floor filled with datapads lining the walls.

"Well, that's archaic," she muttered.

"What is? It's not going to make a difference fighting the SIS guys, is it?"

Mako glanced over at Aqura, who was whispering and sort of creeping along beside her.

"What?" Aqura asked.

"Nothing. Anyway, it should be fine. This place can't get much business, is all. I never pegged Dromund Kaas for a sentimental city."

Aqura nodded, probably tuning out after learning there weren't going to be civilians around. She didn't get that places like this, archives, they were like a historical remnant. Information was kept on servers, not datapads. Even with incredible tech, there couldn't be much information here. It was the sort of place that probably survived on novelty, with rich people buying stuff to show off with.

So the question was, why had Coral holed up here?

They'd find out after. Mako would personally turn the place upside down if-

"Aqura?"

"Yeah?"

"Can you try not to blow everything up? Coral might have left clues."

Aqura cocked her head and gave Mako a long look. "We don't know if the SIS got here first. You really think Coral would risk that? Besides, can't you just comm her again?"

Mako shook her head, tapping her implant and leading the way down to the building's ground floor. "We've got ways of cracking codes…" she trailed off. "Ah."

"Yeah," Aqura agreed. "Whoever these guys are, they probably know about the implants."

"Osik," Mako swore. "And she'll have burned that comm frequency, too."

Aqura nodded, then raised her hand. Slowly, she pointed across the room from the stairs to a doorway leading to a powerful-looking comm terminal.

In the quiet, Mako heard what Aqura had noticed. Voices, at least two.

"...Coral…"

"...trap?"

"...it up."

They backed up as quietly as possible, Aqura pulling Mako to the side and into another room, this one almost perfectly square, with a few desks and racks of datapads forming makeshift paths.

Aqura didn't crouch, but she tried her best to pull back as far behind the stacks as she could. Neither she nor the armour were made for stealth, though, and it made an odd sight.

Mako moved close to her, close enough to whisper out of sight of either of the doors in the room.

"You didn't want to attack?" she whispered.

"Give me a break," the armoured woman murmured back. "You said limit the damage, and I'm not exactly in win-and-take-all shape right now. Did you hear any of what they were saying?"

Mako shook her head and gave the Mandalorian a skeptical look at her turn of phrase. "I got a bit, something about Coral and a trap, but nothing else I could figure out. I've got the schematics, if you want them."

Aqura nodded and Mako sent over the file. After a few seconds, Aqura muttered, "I have no idea what I'm looking at."

There was a moment when Mako considered editing the file with a legend for each aspect of the blueprint, but they didn't have time for that. Later, when they weren't trying to track down and ambush people in an unfamiliar building, they'd try it.

"Other option," Aqura continued, as if she hadn't just gone cross-eyed looking at a simple map. "Can these datapads make noise?"

"Beeps," Mako replied. "Some are probably outfitted with text-to-speech, others might have audio files. Other than that, you'd probably have to throw them." She paused. "Please don't throw them."

She almost sighed in relief at Aqura's head shake, then caught her breath when the hunter said, "bait."

It made sense. Mako wouldn't argue that. The problem was obvious, though.

"Bait gets eaten, Mandokarla."

Aqura winced visibly. "Right. What do you suggest?"

That almost made Mako sigh. She wasn't as good as Gault or Aqura at this sort of thing. Gault had all his experience and Aqura had a knack for fitting things together like the fight was just a puzzle.

"Me'ganar," she breathed. Her translator program prompted a useful, "what do we have?" It was a good question. What she had wasn't much more than Aqura did, just a few weapons and the building blueprints.

Her eyes widened.

"We split up," she blurted out, then raised a hand to her mouth at how loudly she'd spoken. In a whisper, she said, "I've got the map, but no armour. We can't use the datapads as bait, but…" she trailed off.

Aqura, though, was nodding enthusiastically. "But we've got my shiny metal sheb'ika. Alright. Just be sure to show up at the last second, alright?"

Mako nodded, then crept off. Aqura followed her to the edge of the stacks and grabbed her wrist lightly. "Jate'k-"

"GET YOUR HANDS OFF HER!"

Both women whirled on the deep, growling yell to see an armoured man barreling into the room. Aqura's grip tightened painfully and she threw Mako into the cover of the shelves. Mako didn't land well, but the flurry of blaster bolts that hit Aqura - all dead center - made her grateful for the quick, if rough, treatment.

Aqura shrugged off the hits, raised her left arm, and fired her "duel dart".

The blasterfire stopped. There was an instant of silence, Aqura said, "uh, Mako?"

Then a bestial roar filled the room. It was so loud, so angry, that it must have hurt the man's throat.

At least, Mako hoped it was the man yelling. She didn't want to think of what monster might be making that sound otherwise.

"Seven hells," said her voice behind her. "That ain't good."

Mako's head snapped around so fast she felt her brain rattle, and suddenly she was staring into her own face, only with a little mascara and hair braided into a crown.

"You're not Coral," the new lookalike said, then took Mako's wrist. There was a crash from Aqura's direction and the other girl winced and pulled gently. "C'mon. Lets yours and mine fight. I think Sek is comin' off something. Or onto it."

Mako turned to look at the fight behind them, but it was gone. Or, it sort of was. Aqura was flying backwards through a doorway, only barely assisted by her jetpack, and the armoured man chased after her with nothing but his bare hands.

Osik, how badly had Mako screwed up the recipe on that dart?

The pull on her wrist became more insistent, almost dragging Mako backwards now. Osik, this sister was strong.

"If you're not Coral, who-"

The strong lookalike cut off as a missile exploded on the doorway. The building shook and Mako tried to cover her ears as rubble fell in chunks on top of the armoured man.

"Seksark!"

Mako was nearly bowled over by her sister, who dashed past and started scrambling at the debris covering her friend. Almost automatically, Mako contacted Aqura's helmet.

"Mandokarla," Mako said, then added, "sis, are you alright?"

The pained grunt that cut off in an even more high-pitched squeak of pain made Mako's blood go cold.

"Aqura," she whispered so she was certain her doppelganger wouldn't hear, "you'd better be alright. I think we just found another sister and I am not dealing with this alone."

She didn't mean it, not even close to the way it sounded. It was just that it was the best she could think of to make sure Aqura hung on until Mako could get to her.

"Sis, help me out here!"

Mako started, refocusing to see her blood sister still trying to pull rubble away from the doorway.

If Aqura was under that or even on the other side - well, if she was on the other side, there was an easy path around, but it wasn't worth the risk of the minute she'd lose looking.

Mako hurried forward and started picking up whatever she could carry, making sure to lift what she could and double-checking everything in case it was holding anything else up.

"Thanks," said the other, picking up a rock as wide as Mako's shoulders with a groan. "I'm Brook. If your friend got my friend killed, I'm gonna kill him."

"Her- what?"

"Help me with this one." Brook nodded towards a really big piece Mako couldn't imagine lifting, then started worming her fingers under it.

Mako put her hands as far under the rock as she could and she tried to pull. She really did. It was just that the piece was so ridiculously heavy. She strained, but the thing wouldn't budge, even though Brook seemed to be lifting hers up.

Somehow, Mako wasn't even surprised when a golden arm snaked in between hers and Brook's.

Brook, however, was, and she yelped and jumped back slightly, dropping her side of the rock.

An agonized groan came from Aqura, then the sound of her hydraulics locking up.

"Help her!" Mako yelped, scrabbling to balance the rock on the single uninjured arm Aqura was using. Brook recovered and surged forward, grabbing the rock as best she could and lifting with all her might. Aqura's armour came out of its lockdown and they managed to send the rock crashing about a meter away from the rest of the pile, though it almost rolled back at them when it landed awkwardly.

"Kath tits," Brook swore, "what kind of arm- never mind, help me dig Seksark out."

She turned back to lift another rock, then spotted her friend's foot where the last rock had been covering it.

"Seksark!" She raised her voice to a yell. "Sek, if you're alive, twitch your foot or something."

Mako didn't check to see whether Seksark's foot moved. She was watching the suspiciously quiet Aqura. Specifically, the armour weave under the woman's chin and around her throat. It was dark and looked soaked.

"Mandokarla," Mako said slowly. "Take off your helmet."

Aqura shook her head, slowly, as if she didn't want to move anything that shouldn't be moving.

Mako pulled out her med scanner and pointed it at Aqura's neck.

The results came back better than she'd feared, but not great.

Broken jaw. Badly broken, too.

"Osik," Mako swore, pulling a kolto applicator from her hip. "How did he manage-"

"Hey, I still need a hand here."

"In a second," Mako snapped. "Your guy did a number on my sister, too."

"Sek could be- wait, sister?"

Aqura just pushed past Mako and knelt down to start helping with the rubble, this time ignoring her injured shoulder, ribs, elbow, and jaw.

Mako knelt beside them both, growling, "I'm going to put needles in that suit. Lots of them. And I'm going to make sure I can trigger them, too."

Aqura nodded slowly, lifting a rock and tossing it aside, then putting her good shoulder to the collapsed wall to hold it up so Brook could pull some rocks from underneath.

Brook glanced up at Aqura but didn't slow down her work. To Mako, she said, "she looks tall for another sister. Uh… is she always this quiet?"

Mako shook her head, focusing on lifting smaller pieces where she could. "She's adopted. Or I am. And she usually doesn't shut up. Seksark broke her jaw somehow."

Aqura made a sharp movement with her hand that Mako took to mean, "fast."

Brook nodded. "Yeah. It's an uppercut thing he does sometimes with his jetpack. You're lucky he didn't think to use his vibroblades."

They started uncovering more of the man's legs, up to his knees now, but now they had to pull more rocks from the top of the pile just to make sure nothing fell as they dug underneath.

Hopefully, the man was alive.

"I just wish I knew what got him so riled up," Brook muttered.

Mako decided to change the subject.

"What are you doing here?" she asked. "We came here looking for some SIS thugs coming after Coral."

Brook wiped sweat from her brow, then wiped her hands on her pants. "SIS? On Dromund Kaas?" She shook her head and got back to lifting. "I got a call from someone named Coral, who claimed to be my sister. We believed her for pretty obvious reasons. Just before we got here, though, I got a message that she was under attack. We came in looking for trouble and…" She trailed off.

Mako did the same, her work slowing until she stood up straight, confused. It didn't make sense. Coral had been trying to kill people in Project 32. This was clearly a setup to get Brook and Mako to kill each other, otherwise Coral would be here to clear up any misunderstandings - or she would have at least sent a warning. That also implied the three of them were all involved in Project 32 or something else to do with Coral's motivations for her killing spree. That was fine and sensible, except what were the odds Mako and Brook actually killed each other? Really, they were so low that this could all just be a misunderstanding. If Mako was going to kill a group of people like this, she'd do a Gault and gather all her enemies together, soften them up, then try to kill them with hired guns.

"Brook," Mako said slowly, "you weren't hired to kill anyone in here, were you?"

Brook snorted. "No. Sek and me don't work that way. We're mercenaries, not hired guns."

Mako was going to ask the difference when two people walked into the surviving door.

Two others of her.

Two more. Shabla, two more!? Those birth certificates had had similar genetic markers, but this made five identical twins.

Mako made a promise to herself to study up on DNA when she got back to the Cosmic Torrent.

What were they even doing here? Were they with Coral? Were they with the SIS? Would they recognize Mako and Brook as friends or shoot first?

"Keep digging," Mako murmured, then started walking towards the two strangers, her hands raised.

They spotted her the moment she stepped away from the rubble, and jumped back. One pulled a blaster, the other just held up a hand.

"Hold it right there, Coral."

Mako practically slapped her forehead. "For the love of- I'm not Coral!"

"Don't do anything stupid," the unarmed one said. Then, to her companion, "we should wait for Izak."

Unbelievably, the one with the blaster actually turned to the other one and lowered her blaster, asking, "are you crazy? What are we supposed to do, ask her to behave herself?"

"I'm just saying Izak will be here soon. Let's not jump the gun."

Well, at least that gave them a bit of a timeline. Though it also made Mako wonder if, just maybe, Coral had been telling the truth about being hunted by the SIS.

Better to ask. Mako glanced back at Aqura and Brook. Brook had her back to the conversation, but Aqura was watching the new… the new sisters as much as she was watching what she was moving.

"Pay attention, Mandokarla," Mako whispered, then spoke up to the two newcomers. "Hey. Hello? Guys, we've got somebody…"

"Maybe Izak will get here soon," one of the pair continued, "maybe he'll decide to stop for lunch first. We don't exactly have a lot of options here."

"You could help us dig our friend out!" Mako yelled.

Both of the newcomers turned back to her, stunned.

Oh, good, yelling worked. At least she hadn't had to shoot at them.

"There's somebody who's been buried under this doorway for five minutes now," Mako half-shouted, gesturing back at the rubble. "You can stand and watch, you can help us out, or I can sic a very grumpy Mandalorian on you. Got it? Those are your options. Will that make Izak happy?"

The pair looked dumbfounded now, doing nothing but staring at her, wide-eyed.

Good. Idiots.

Mako got back to helping with the debris. Piece after piece, cutting herself once or twice until Aqura took off her gauntlets and handed them over. There was a short argument, but Mako finally agreed to take them if Aqura would take some kolto and just a minute of rest.

Aqura lasted about forty seconds of not helping, but that was pretty good for her.

Mako updated Gault silently as they worked, just enough that he knew they'd met three sisters, none of whom were Coral. And Aqura got her jaw broken. He sent back asking if he should come pick them up and she told him to stay on standby.

Four more people came into the room like a trained squad of soldiers as Aqura was holding up a linchpin rock for them. Mako yelled, "tell them we'll be with them in a sec," and then pulled. The rubble rolled down and to the side with three other pieces, exactly where Mako had been hoping they would.

Aqura, still holding up some debris, gave a grunt and shoved her shoulder into the side of the remaining pile, then grunted more urgently.

"I got him," Brook said, scrambling around the armoured woman and, with a little help from Mako, pulling Seksark out of the doorway.

Seksark wasn't all that bruised, and except for a lot of grey dust in his… Mako wanted to say brown?... hair, he didn't look too bad. The problem was that he was still unconscious, and when an armoured guy with a weathered face was out for that long, it was probably a bad sign.

Mako scanned him. Then she scanned him again, looking more closely at the blood chemistry she got back.

"He's alive," she said absently, looking through the list of chemicals and trying to figure out what they added to. She'd write a program to filter through this sort of thing later. "What's all this in his system?"

The stuff in Mako's little dart made up maybe a fifth of the foreign chemicals here.

Brook looked away, then up at the SIS agents. "Are we gonna deal with the guys with all the guns pointed at us?"

If Gault were here or Aqura could talk, it would have been their job. Mako found herself wishing she'd called Gault just so he could be here to talk instead.

Instead, Mako stepped forward, though she had to push Aqura aside a bit just so she could be seen past the armoured woman.

"Hi," she said, waving. "Uh, we've…" she trailed off gesturing helplessly at the armoured man on the floor. "Kinda got somebody hurt here. I've got a lot of questions, but maybe they could wait for some time without all the guns?"

This would be a lot easier if they all looked like street thugs. A bunch of trained spies was surprisingly intimidating.

One of them stepped forward, a man so clean-cut his clothes, hair, and even cheeks looked like they were made exclusively of straight lines. At least he lowered his blaster pistol.

"There are two of you," he said slowly, looking from Mako to Brook in a piercing sort of way. "That's at least one more than we thought were alive. Two, since I'm guessing neither of you is Coral."

"Finally," Mako said, almost throwing her hands in the air in exasperation. "Does that mean you're with Project 32? Because I've got a lot of questions. Like why I have four lookalikes."

The clean-cut man was silent, calculating for a few moments, then he nodded. "I suppose you're as involved as it gets. Yes, we're with Project 32. You can call me Izak."

He looked at the other two lookalikes, the dumb ones. "Do you two want to introduce yourselves?"

One of them scoffed, but the other nodded and said, "I'm Ray. This is Dory."

Mako gave a weak smile and pushed back at Aqura nudging her shoulder. "I'm Mako," she said, then pointed back. "That's Brook. We sort of got lured into a fight by a distress call from our other sister, Coral. Does that explain enough for everyone to put their guns away?"

Izak waved a hand at the others and all of them put their guns down. Both Mako and Aqura relaxed.

Except, Aqura was still breathing heavily, and with the kind of pained groans that meant kolto would be the least of what she needed right now.

"Good," Mako spoke first, and fast. "We all need to get out of here. Izak, you can have our holo frequencies, but we need to go. My partner's not in great shape and neither is Brook's. And," she added when it looked like he'd protest, "I don't think a bunch of SIS on Dromund Kaas should be making a lot of noise. I'll get answers as soon as I can, but not right now. Unless you can tell us everything in the next five minutes."

It hurt to say, but Seksark and Aqura were both in bad shape. Aqura needed kolto half an hour ago and Sek still wasn't conscious. Whatever chemicals were in that man's system weren't doing him any favours.

One of the lookalikes, Dory, almost spoke up, but Izak raised a hand to quiet her and she stopped talking instantly.

"Alright," Izak said. "We go our separate ways for now. Just steer clear of Coral. This is more of you than I thought were still alive. We've got a lot of digging to do to find out what's going on, and you only get to be part of it if she hasn't killed you."

Mako smiled, then helped Brook pick up the unconscious armoured man between them.

"Mandokarla," she said just loudly enough for Izak to hear, "we should comm Gault."

Aqura gave her a long look, then brought out her holocomm and held it in front of Mako. Gault flashed into sight above the device.

"All done?" he asked.

Mako grinned at him, then up at Izak.

"It's a start," she replied.


End file.
